User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX)

In the world of Digital Transformation, UX & CX are extremely important to keep all the stakeholders engaged. But what is different between all them?

User Experience-UX is when customer starts interacting with website, mobile apps or the products. It is measured in clicks to completion, success rates, abandonment rate etc. Good UX gives customer an ability to:

·Find any information on your website easily and quickly

·Search web pages with ease

·Complete a desired task without any hassles

Customer experience-CX encompasses all the interactions a person has with your brand at all the different touch points like desktop, mobile, call center, marketing, sales etc. It can be measured in overall experience, brand loyalty, recommendation to others. Good CX gives customer an ability to:

·Have a pleasant, helpful interaction with the organization

·Feel positive and happy about it

·Spread the happiness socially and via word of mouth

UX & CX can be simply explained with Airline Company. When you book the flights on their website, check the status on the mobile app, store the e-boarding pass, email it etc. is all UX. When you actually come to airport terminal and see long queues for check-ins, very less agents helping customers, no communication on departures, lost bags etc. is all about CX.

Another great retail example is Amazon. When you land on their website, do the search for the products, select the product, putting it into the cart and finally pay for it is all about UX.

When you call the customer service for any returns or refunds or problems about orders, the time you have to wait on the call, how their service rep politely answers your queries, how quickly you get your refunds or able to return your products without any hassles, is all about CX.

While designing UX, many designers just focus on pretty looks & features. But they need to avoid information overload, too much text, cluttered forms and keep it simple for users. They should focus on one core functionality and make it really simple for your user to access, use and become great at that functionality.

You might have the best advertising, brand recognition, sales team, customer service representatives, and organizational structure (all CX-related items), but if customers’ interactions with your website, mobile app, software or other product (all UX-related items) create barriers to completion of the desired tasks, overall CX fails.

Some of the best experience brands today are Apple, Disney, Google, Coca Cola, Amazon, BMW, Sony and Louis Vuitton.

·Instagram app has clear focus on camera button

·Airbnb uses very simple visually appealing app for users

·Amazon uses positive psychological techniques to drive sales.

Hence UX can make the biggest difference in your new product, and will help you truly connect with the users but later CX has to improve it further.

Sandeep Raut is Director for Digital Transformation in Syntel. He has more than 29 years of IT Services / Consulting / Off-shoring experience with over 18 years in Business Intelligence space. He had helped organizations in establishing the BI-Analytics Services CoEs.

4 Responses to User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX)

Hi Sandeep: thank you for contrasting UX and CX. As I wrote in a post about design last year that applies to software, good design delights. It tells customers that they are in good hands. That they are understood and respected. Embedding those properties in a product or software application isn’t easy. It requires empathy, creativity, and good processes.

Hi Sandeep; so UX is CX without people? In your airport example, I assume that wayfinding signs are UX while asking a uniformed police person for directions is CX.

If I am correct, that means that CX is much more difficult to get consistently right because of the human factor and good UX is extremely difficuly to get wrong because there is no (or little) variability.

I agree with ANdrew that UX has great opportunities to improve but as it does it will raise the CX bar!

The discussion about what is UX, CX and Service Design has been raging in their respective communities for a couple of years. Forrester analyst Kerry Bodine’s blog on ‘How Does Service Design Relate To CX And UX?’ probably captures the current views of practitioners best.

In Bodine’s blog, she suggests that UX is a subset of CX. Your suggestion that UX is concerned with interaction mechanics whilst CX is concerned with customer perceptions is neither in-line with the prevailing wisdom nor helpful. It is essential that UX designers recognise that they are designing interactions within a larger customer experience. If UX designers only concentrate on the mechanics of digital interactions they will produce poor quality customer experiences.

Bodine’s blog also suggests that CX and Service Design are rapidly merging to become one and the same thing. Both use almost identical perspectives, frameworks and tools. Both are concerned with how interactions provide better services for customers and how collectively the interactions constitute the customer experience. Despite their respective practitioners often having different backgrounds, they are to all intents and purposes the same.

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